Jim Blackwood of Blackwood Labs in his Florence workshop. He creates prototypes for many ideas hatched by the inventors' group !dea Soup.

Usually, it's simple. To cover a story, you conduct an interview, then schedule a photographer to shoot a photo.

Unless the group you're covering is !dea Soup.

Mention a photo to these folks and one member wonders out loud, "So how do you convey this group as an image?" Another member says, "We should have an overhead shot - straight down on the circle of people - and then Photoshop it to put us in a pot."

A third member dashes out of the room to get a camera he has stashed in his car. A fourth climbs on a chair, hoists the camera over her head and shoots the photo.

!dea Soup is an inventors' group and - as the photo example makes clear - no stodgy idea is safe in its midst.

The diverse set of members - among them a design engineer, patent attorney, marketer, purchasing agent, homemaker and retired HR director - love nothing more than to identify a problem, wrestle it to the ground, bandy about solutions, challenge each other's thinking and come up with a product to meet a need.

!dea Soup members not only pick up the ball and run with it, they redesign the ball.

"I see things that are done in a stupid way and want to change that," is how member Ken Bowman, a small-business owner and city councilman in Fort Thomas, puts it.

The group was started in 2007 by a handful of members disillusioned with their corporate careers or ventures into entrepreneurship. They watched good ideas die on the vine and bad ideas linger in workplace cultures overrun by greed, rigidity and competitiveness. They started !dea Soup - basically an inventors' co-op - to develop and market new product ideas with as little delay, bureaucracy or overhead as possible. And they wanted to have fun in the process.

"The system for product development and patenting is broken and !dea Soup is a way to fix it," says founding director Tom Kruer of Edgewood. "It's holistic. It's synergistic. It's community - it's about bringing people together to be their best and to do what they enjoy doing."

Members, who come from across Greater Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky, decide which projects they'll work on and take on only the duties they like. Their payment - which the group calls "cups of soup" - comes only after a product returns a profit and is determined by how much they've contributed to the process.

At a monthly meeting, the group gathered in a circle in a member's living room, !dea Soup is a study in initiative and collaboration.

iPads and notebooks are out on people's laps, online research is under way, texts are flying to outside contacts.

The night's discussion centers on marketing a wheelchair that allows its user to move himself onto a chair or bed. Some members suggest partnering with a senior services agency or marketing it through the Veterans Administration. Others work on clarifying the profit margin or defining the market. One man suggests expanding the design so the wheelchair has other functions, like reclining.

Members of the group hold dozens of patents, including one for the wheelchair. They have yet to see their first product through to market but have come close with several ideas, including a football-hiking machine.

"We don't know at what point one of these ideas could break into a huge development, but we know it could happen at any time," says Jim Blackwood of Florence, a former patent attorney who now owns his own product-development lab and creates prototypes for many of the group's ideas.

Jim Friedman, professor of creativity at Miami University's Center for Creativity and Innovation, says small cells of inventors and entrepreneurs are an economic boon to a region because they breed innovation.

"Creativity is about things crashing into each other, and when you bring together people with so many different experiences, you get everything they've all been thinking about," Friedman says. "One of the cool things about an !dea Soup is that people take their ideas to the next level. Creativity is an idea. Innovation is an action."

Foster a base of creative, inventive, empowered people, experts like Friedman say, and you foster job creation, new startups and economic growth.

"You can think back to the Renaissance and get the idea," Blackwood says. "The arts were encouraged, creativity flourished and the region prospered greatly. It would be the same thing in Greater Cincinnati - we'd see an outpouring of new ideas, new and better ways to do things. We have the other infrastructure in place. If you add that creative spark, you provide the work for that infrastructure to do."

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RAMSEY: For these inventors, creativity is necessity

Usually, it's simple. To cover a story, you conduct an interview, then schedule a photographer to shoot a photo.